Explaining the Apartheid City: 20 Years of South African Urban Historiography¶
Paul Maylam (1995). Explaining the Apartheid City: 20 Years of South African Urban Historiography. Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol. 21, No. 1 (Special Issue: Urban Studies and Urban Change in Southern Africa). Taylor & Francis.
| Type | journal article |
| Scope | Wider apartheid literature |
| Method | synthesis review |
| Period studied | 1834–1994 |
| Regions | South Africa, Port Elizabeth, East London, Cape Town, Durban, Johannesburg, Kimberley, Pietermaritzburg |
| Themes | origins segregation, bantustans removals influx, demography urbanisation, business and state, politics ideology elections, methods data sources, comparative theory, labour markets wages |
| Citation key | maylam1995 |
Argument¶
Maylam reviews twenty years of South African urban historiography on segregation and the apartheid city. He argues that segregation evolved over a long period in a haphazard, piecemeal way, so that continuities before and after the 1923 Natives (Urban Areas) Act and the 1950 Group Areas Act outweigh the discontinuities. The notion that the National Party reversed a liberal United Party urban policy is called liberal mythology. Material interests mattered more than the 'sanitation syndrome' in driving segregation. Urban policy aimed at tight control of the black underclasses but was riddled with contradictions, chiefly over cost and between inclusion and exclusion. The historiography has not clarified central-local state or state-capital relations, and he urges retaining materialist analysis against the post-modern turn.
Evidence and method¶
Secondary literature only: published case studies, theses and workshop papers on Port Elizabeth, East London, Cape Town, Durban, Johannesburg, Kimberley and others, plus works on influx control, housing, liquor control and native administration. It draws on a few cited primary-derived points (commission reports, legislation, council decisions) via these studies.
Place in the debates¶
- Liberal vs revisionist/radical interpretations of apartheid (continuity vs rupture in 1948) (see Origins, coherence and ideology of apartheid and Afrikaner nationalism). Rejects the liberal view of a sharp National Party break from a liberal United Party. Stresses long-term continuity, with the Group Areas Act as culmination of pre-1948 trends, while acknowledging apartheid's greater rigidity and central-state intervention.
- Origins and imperatives of urban segregation: sanitation syndrome vs materialist explanations (see Urban segregation, Group Areas and the apartheid city). Sanitation was probably a pretext or metaphor; material interests (ratepayers, merchants, white workers, capital's labour control and land needs) weighed more heavily.
- Structuralist/instrumentalist vs social-history and post-modern approaches to the state and capital (see Historiographical approaches). Rejects crude instrumentalism and reductionism but warns against discarding material and structural analysis ('the baby and the bath-water').
- Nature of influx control (Hindson materialist vs Posel less reductionist) (see Influx control, pass laws and African urbanisation). Notes both modify earlier determinism. Hindson stays materialist while Posel stresses labour supply plus limiting urbanisation. Calls for more attention to local variation and the central-local relationship.
Findings¶
-
Continuities in segregation before and after 1923 and 1950 outweigh discontinuities, and segregation evolved haphazardly. (p. 2)
The continuities before and after both the 1923 Natives (Urban Areas) Act and the 1950 Group Areas Act are more striking than the discontinuities.
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Segregation was already well advanced before the Group Areas Act, and the 1923 Act enabled but did not compel it. (p. 10)
The 1923 Act recommended and enabled residential segregation, but did not compel it. Although the 1950 Act had devastating consequences for many communities, segregation was already well advanced
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Pre-1948 United Party councils planned removals later carried out by the NP, undermining the liberal narrative. (p. 11)
the Johannesburg City Council approved, with only one dissenting vote, a scheme for the removal of the western areas black freehold settlements of Sophiatown, Martindale and Newclare - in 1944
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The Group Areas Act was not the product of an NP master plan and was as much bureaucratic as political. (p. 11)
As Mabin has shown, there was no group areas master-plan. The legislation was not preceded by a major government commission.
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The sanitation syndrome was more likely a pretext than the main driver; material interests weighed more heavily. (p. 8)
Material interests appear to have weighed much more heavily in the drive to urban segregation.
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Segregation served capital through labour control and by releasing land, as shown by Mabin on Kimberley. (p. 9)
Residential racial segregation could be in the interests of capital for two main reasons: first, in facilitating labour control and, second, in releasing land for industrial purposes.
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Municipal beer monopolies funded native administration rather than housing, while liquor control also closed informal-sector economic space. (p. 15)
More important, the monopoly generated revenue to fund the management of the black underclasses.
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Apartheid's core contradiction was between exploiting cheap urban black labour and minimising its presence. (p. 18)
The ultimate objective of apartheid was to achieve the unattainable - to maximise the exploitation of cheap black urban labour, while minimising the presence of the labourers in white urban areas.
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Influx control tightened pre-existing measures and was self-defeating, displacing people to impoverished reserves and prompting evasion. (p. 18)
Influx control in the 1950s and 1960s represented a tightening of pre-existing measures rather than a significant new policy departure.
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Subeconomic housing and transport functioned as wage subsidies, but state-capital-local relations remain poorly understood. (p. 20)
Thus, central or local state subeconomic housing and transport schemes amounted to a wage subsidy. But how these tensions and conflicts of interest were played out is far from clear.
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Local state autonomy persisted until the 1960s, with full centralisation only with the 1970s administration boards, and cost disputes shaped central-local tensions. (p. 19)
Fuller centralisation only came in the early 1970s with the establishment of the administration boards as the central state agencies responsible for the control of urban blacks.
Evidence ledger¶
Sources used¶
| Source | Kind | Period | How used |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1914 Tuberculosis Commission report | commission or official report | 1914 | Cited, via Swanson and Parnell, as showing that official health commissions tied locations and slums to disease and so supported segregation. |
| 1918 Influenza Commission report | commission or official report | 1918 | Cited with the Tuberculosis Commission as showing the health discourse that linked urban black settlement to segregation. |
| 1939 Thornton Committee report on uncontrolled peri-urban settlement | commission or official report | 1939 | Shows the Department of Health's involvement in urban settlement policy. |
| Reports of the 1935 Young-Barrett Committee and the 1946-1948 Fagan Commission | commission or official report | 1935; 1946-1948 | Cited as expressing the liberal agenda of class-differentiated housing for Africans. |
| 1923 Natives (Urban Areas) Act | legislation gazette | 1923 | Used to show that the Act enabled but did not compel segregation, so municipal implementation varied. |
| 1950 Group Areas Act | legislation gazette | 1950 | Treated as the culmination of earlier policy, not a radical break, since cities were already largely segregated. |
| 1919 Public Health Act and 1934 Slums Act | legislation gazette | 1919; 1934 | Examples of indirect segregationist legislation operating through public health and slum clearance. |
| 1920 Housing Act (Central Housing Board) and 1943 Housing Amendment Act | legislation gazette | 1920; 1943 | Shows housing legislation embedded racial definition and restriction in public housing. |
| 1931 Transvaal Town Planning Ordinance | legislation gazette | 1931 | Cited as town-planning law that reinforced racial zoning from the 1930s. |
| 1943 Pegging Act and 1946 'Ghetto Act' | legislation gazette | 1943; 1946 | Evidence that the United Party government favoured racial zoning before 1948. |
| 1897 Licensing Act (Natal) | legislation gazette | 1897 | Used to show local councils withholding trading licences from Indian traders, as evidence of commercial motives for segregation. |
| 1902 Transvaal liquor ordinance and municipal beer monopoly records | legislation gazette | 1902-1940 | Used to describe liquor control, beer monopolies and their role in funding native administration. |
| Mid-nineteenth-century municipal and government regulations (Port Elizabeth 1855; East London 1849, 1857) | legislation gazette | 1849-1857 | Cited via Christopher, Baines and Nel as early local segregationist measures. |
| Homes Apart: South Africa's Segregated Cities (Lemon ed., 1991) and associated urban case-study theses | secondary literature compilation | c. 1834-1990 | The main evidentiary base of the review: city case studies are compared and synthesised. |
Inference¶
Quantification: None.
Historiographical review. The author compares and synthesises published case studies and theses across cities and periods, and argues from this body of work, without data of his own, for continuity in urban segregation policy and for the importance of material forces.
Key claims¶
| Claim | Basis | Strength |
|---|---|---|
| Long-term continuities in urban segregation policy outweigh the discontinuity of 1948/1950; the Group Areas Act culminated earlier trends. (p. 17) | Synthesis of city case studies (Durban, East London, Cape Town, Johannesburg) and the legislative record; no new data. | Partial data |
| United Party-controlled city councils planned racial removals before 1948, for example the Western Areas in 1944 and District Six in 1940. (p. 11) | Secondary studies by van Tonder, Hart and Saunders, based on council records. | Partial data |
| The 'sanitation syndrome' was more a pretext for segregation than its main imperative; material interests mattered more. (p. 8) | Case studies of plague and influenza episodes and of Indian commercial competition; the health commission reports; interpretive weighing of the literature. | Illustrative or anecdotal |
| There was no Group Areas master-plan or NP blueprint; implementation was as much bureaucratic as political. (p. 11) | Mabin, Lazar and Posel's studies of the Act's origins and the absence of a preceding commission. | Partial data |
| Municipal beer monopolies financed native administration rather than housing, and financial parsimony produced a contradiction between cost and control. (p. 15) | Case studies of Durban's native revenue account and of Johannesburg and East London; no financial series presented. | Partial data |
| Local states enjoyed considerable autonomy in urban and influx-control policy until the 1960s, and central-local tension centred on finance. (p. 19) | Scattered references in case studies and Posel's study of NAD inexperience; the author concedes the evidence is fragmentary. | Illustrative or anecdotal |
| Municipal budgets were skewed towards whites, but this has been asserted from impression and not documented. (p. 20) | No data cited; the author calls for research. | Asserted |
The author's caveats¶
The author notes that research is concentrated on four metropoles and on case studies, that there are few syntheses or comparative analyses, that little has been written on hostels, UBCs and nationwide Slums Act application, and that the central-local and state-capital relationships are poorly evidenced.
Gaps in the evidence¶
The review rests entirely on secondary literature and does not itself assess the underlying archives, so its claims about continuity and motive depend on case-study selection. Systematic municipal budget and expenditure series by race, council minutes across a wider range of towns, and Group Areas Board records would test the claims of continuity, local autonomy and inequitable resource allocation. Most of this material existed in archives at the time and is now more accessible.
Replicability: Not applicable.